The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  Her husband believes he is different from her: she’s a lady and he’s a man—a real man. Fast and hard in bed, he’s convinced he’s a great lover, but his wife just isn’t, well … she’s a good woman, you see. He’d done his share of being wild, he wasn’t no saint, he had to admit it (but not to her), he had a bit of the devil in him. But sittin there in church with her on Sundays and listenin to that minister givin him what for, the feelin creeps upon him that maybe it wasn’t so good after all, what he was doin, and that that Betty now, boy did she have a pair though, well, she was fun, but if truth be told, she weren’t much better than a whore.

  It was sex itself that was evil, like the Bible said.

  So he gave it up. For the most part. He took to rifle practice on Tuesday nights, bowling Wednesdays, and poker with the guys on Fridays. Over the weekend (Thank the Lord in His Mercy) there was football. And he stopped, for the most part, just that any woman that wasn’t a good woman like his wife, that dressed a little—well, you know—or walked out on the street at night alone: well, she got what was comin to her. But he was sure he had conquered the vice in his soul. Just had to get these tramps, these whores of Babylon, these temptresses under control.

  But he, himself, he was saved! Hallelujah!

  (Meanwhile, in Cambodia, government forces were wiping out villages suspected of wrong thinking.)

  He would not notice when he beat his son with his belt for stealing money from his mama’s purse to buy candy with that he was hitting too hard, that he didn’t even hear the child’s screams, that his wife was pulling on his arm, calling him, screaming at him. Because the kid wasn’t getting the message, wasn’t understanding him: Do not expect pleasure in this life! Learn to obey!

  He was pure and free from sin and he ought to know.

  Nor would his wife notice, when her daughter was overjoyed with something that had happened in school that day, was whirling around in the living room in extravagant elation, and she went in with pursed lips, hearing the crash, having expected it, and said: You see there now! You knocked over the table! It’s a wonder you didn’t break the lamp. Now you stop, hear?: that she was saying, Don’t move, don’t expect, you’ll bring everything down around you.

  (In Argentina, at that very moment, the secret police whisked a young couple off the street and took them to a prison that had no official existence.)

  Oh, what’s the point of trying to sort these things out?

  The point is that one has no choice.

  But your truths are always so simple.

  Yes. Bus ride somewhere, a conference, yes, near Chicago, all of us on the way to the airport. Professor Bickford, elderly and respected, had come to her lecture. He hobbled up the aisle from his seat to hers and asked permission to sit beside her.

  He had listened to her talk, he said. Thought she was brilliant, profound.

  He can’t be coming on. I don’t believe it

  He traveled a great deal, he said.

  I don’t believe it, he wouldn’t. He’s an innocent Of course, I’ve been surprised before. Remember that kindly old toothless man in Assisi? Told you he was ninety-two, asked you how you liked his town, and then grabbed you with a wiry hand that felt like a claw.

  And in his travels, he said, he met a great many interesting people. Fascinating people.

  What do you suppose he wants?

  And when he met these people, he always did one thing. He’d been doing it for years now, whenever he met interesting people. He asked them a question. Might he ask her that question?

  Oh god. My favorite author. My institutional background: like Terence Malle, he has a theory of personality derived from whether you got your education on the East Coast (Harvard/Yale) or the West Coast (Berkeley). There weren’t any other places, except Oxford/Cambridge, and they were unmistakable.

  The question was: You are a scholar and a thinker who has read the great literature of the past and has thoughtfully viewed the life of the present: what, in your eyes, is the most profound truth of human existence?

  He stopped and watched her, watching her very lips.

  I don’t believe this. And what’s more, he’s expecting long words, long sentences. He has his pencil ready. She made a firm decision not to answer. He was a kind man, a good man, she could see it in his innocent blue eyes, his quivering white mustache, his nice plump smiling wife, his poised sharpened teacher’s pencil. He represented what was best in academia.

  And in his blindness, he represented the worst.

  No, don’t answer.

  “Everybody fucks up,” her mouth blurted.

  He rose quickly and quivered his way back to his seat and his comforting wife after a thank-you that sounded more like an inhalation.

  Sorry. Sorry. But you deserved it, with such a question. You wanted some nice abstract formula that would sound profound, didn’t you? Besides, how could you know that Elspeth had just, that it was only a few months, that I was sick to death of words words words.

  Sorry.

  But he should have known. Because the horrors went on at home and abroad, in the kitchen and the nursery and the bedroom and the maproom and the conference rooms and the office of the high command and also in the field and the tiger cages. But everybody pretended we were living in a world where there was a clear right way to do everything. Everybody had a recipe. How to have a happy marriage, how to have a happy divorce, how to have a happy remarriage, how to stay thin, how to screw, how to make money, how to stay healthy, how to live forever. Yes.

  Sometimes, Dolores had a dream. It was not really a dream, it came when she was awake, but not fully awake. Someplace in between sleep and wake. It came when she was troubled and it came when she was not troubled. It came when it chose.

  She was lying in bed, near sleep, when she felt the heat, and opened her eyes. There was a glow and she looked and he was there, sitting at the foot of the bed, naked and gold-bronze and glowing. She recognized him because she’d been expecting him for years. His skin was shimmering in the moonlight that poured like phosphorescent milk through the bedroom window. His expression was utterly serene; he had just a little smile, not even a smile, just a loving expression. He was her angel, her animus, she knew that.

  So she pulled herself up from the pillow and sat back against the headboard and crossed her arms, and said, “Okay, you bastard, now talk!”

  He smiles. And talks. He explains everything, slowly, carefully. How the moon sun stars planets animals plants stones water people, how there was a plan for everything for all creatures with fur feathers scales dandruff, and it was glorious because it all made SENSE! SENSE! Even the pain inflicted by humans on humans, even the insanity of human culture as it presently existed, had a purpose in the overall plan.

  She rapped out questions, trying to be tough. Little by little, her questions grow gentler, she is lulled into the beauty of it, it makes everything bearable. And little by little, her neck relaxes, and her head sinks back against the pillow. She listens in complete trust; he has hedged nothing, not the smallest thing. She doesn’t have to scrutinize him anymore, she knows his face is telling her the truth. She doesn’t have to look at him because his glow is everywhere, but she wants to look at him because he is beautiful and she loves him. She never has to think again, he has made everything clear. She never has to suffer again, because all of it makes sense.

  And that clarity is the greatest bliss she has ever experienced. Her mind is in rapture. She feels herself glowing too. She is completely filled. (Jesus will fill you with His love.)

  He pauses. He coughs a little. (Do angels cough? she wonders.) He says, hesitantly: The trouble is that now you know all this, we cannot permit you to remain on earth.

  She nods. That seems to make perfect sense. Human beings have always lived in blindness, so of course they always will. Must. She doesn’t question that. It doesn’t occur to her to suggest that perhaps this would be a good time to change that. No, she just nods. She surrenders. (What else can you
do with a God?) And heaven knows, when he leans forward to take her in his arms, she doesn’t quibble: she leans towards him, wanting to be in such arms, against such skin. They melt together and they float upwards, off the bed, up and out into space, and he is hot and shining and she is hot and shining and their bodies come together in all that heat and they float out into space in a togetherness that knocks the rocks to orgasm.

  5

  DOLORES AND VICTOR WERE driving to Manchester in the rain. That is, Victor was driving and Dolores was watching the windshield wipers. And he was talking about his father, his fondness for his father, the bully boy, the roarer. “Except for one thing. He used to smoke a pipe, and he’d lay it down in an ashtray without finishing it, and it would go out. And the smell of that in a room literally made me vomit—when I was very small, anyhow. I learned to control it—but I had to learn to control it. He never stopped leaving those stinky pipes around.”

  Dolores rubbed his knee.

  “It’s strange, though, when I smoked a pipe, it didn’t bother me at all, and I sometimes did the same thing. I tried not to, thinking it might make other people sick the way it had me. But sometimes I think we seize on one thing our parents do and hate that, use it as a kind of wastebin for all the other bad feelings we don’t let ourselves feel.”

  “Yes. Anthony used to hate the way his father chewed. It really made him want to scream. Sometimes, when he was a boy, he had to leave the table and go into the john and recover.”

  “How did he feel about his father?”

  “All he ever admitted to was love and admiration.”

  “And what do you think?”

  She shrugged. “I’m sure it had to be terribly complicated.”

  “Tell me about Anthony. The boy. The one you fell in love with.”

  “Well. To begin with there was Jessie, who was eighteen and very beautiful and madly in love with Aldrich, and a little pregnant. She and Aldrich got married. I don’t know how he felt about her then. In later years he looked down on her. It was embarrassing to watch, you felt she must feel humiliated. If she did, she never showed it. But Aldrich was bright, and Jessie wasn’t. When the baby was born, Aldrich fell madly in love with her, Laura, who had big violet eyes and an athletic body.

  “They were happy. They had a little house, a car, nice clothes. I’ve seen the pictures. Everybody took pictures in those days. It’s nice, I wish I’d taken more….

  “Times were high, money all over the place, Aldrich was rising fast in the Boston office of Blanchard Oil. Jessie got pregnant again. She didn’t want another baby because Aldrich didn’t want another baby. He was crazy for Laura. Jessie drank ergot tea, but it didn’t work, and Anthony was born. But Aldrich went on being crazy for Laura, and because Jessie was crazy for Aldrich, she was crazy for Laura too. Anthony just tailed along. You can see it in the pictures: he’s little and sad and sweet and his drawers droop as if he knows he’s fringe. Laura is full-bodied, bursting with energy, her smile is like an Olympic medalist’s. She takes up all the space of the picture.

  “When she was nine, Laura fell ill with rheumatic fever. Jessie and her sister took their children to Florida to spend the winter. Laura recovered, and the next winter they stayed in Brookline. But when she was ten, she came home from a Sunday School picnic in a Light rain. Jessie once said to me: ‘I knew it was going to rain, Dolores. But I thought—what could happen to her going to a Sunday School picnic? God wouldn’t let anything happen to her.’ Well, God did, or somebody. She caught a cold and got sicker and sicker and was in a wheelchair for months, and one day around her eleventh birthday, she died.

  “Anthony was seven, and playing ball in the back of the house with his friends. He saw his mother come out of the house with his aunts around her, he saw her get into a car, he ran to catch her to find out where she was going, but she was gone. He trudged back and looked at his sister’s wheelchair on the back porch and wondered where she was. It must have frightened him—his mother gone out and his sister absent? His mother never left his sister’s side—because he remembers it, and that’s about all he remembers for a long time.

  “Aldrich and Jessie went away with Jessie’s sister and her husband. They were millionaires, they had a yacht, and they took Aldrich and Jessie on a cruise around the world. They were gone for a year. They never said good-bye to Anthony, or explained anything to him. Jessie told me this. Jessie’s mother came over and picked Anthony up and took him home with her; relatives and friends came over and closed up the house, put furniture in storage, sold most of it. Jessie and Aldrich never went back to that house.

  “And Jessie never healed. She could never pass the street on which the house stood where Laura had died without getting the shakes. She never again, in her life, slept without chloral, or later, Nembutal. She spent her afternoons, after Anthony was at school, driving madly anyplace, every place, running to shops, running constantly. And for a long time, she would not let Anthony touch her.

  “‘Every time his little hand would touch me, Dolores, I’d leap away from it, I couldn’t stand it, it was Laura’s hand, it reminded me of hers, but hers was gone.’

  “Once, in a low mood, as close to the truth as he ever allowed himself to come, Anthony told me he used to wish that he had died instead of Laura.

  “Well, they went on living,” Dolores sighed. “People do. The Depression fell, but Aldrich was still doing well. Better than well, because to have a good-paying job in the Depression made you rich. He was smart and ambitious. He bought up real estate. Anthony listened to football games on the radio and planned to go to West Point, an ambition Aldrich fostered.

  “Then, suddenly, Aldrich fell ill. It began as a kind of indigestion, but very soon he could not keep anything down. He was in pain. The first diagnosis was ulcers, but the treatment didn’t help. They went to other doctors. They began a trek around the country, going from clinic to clinic. Anthony was left again, with Grandma. Nothing helped, no one could diagnose it. The only clear fact was that he was dying.

  “Finally, Jessie left him, tearfully, at a sanatorium in Saranac and returned to her son. As often as they could, the woman and the boy made the long drive from Boston to visit him. Aldrich’s illness was a constant subject of conversation, and Jessie always listened to suggestions. One day someone mentioned a clinic they hadn’t heard of, somewhere in the Middle West Jessie made arrangements, she drove to Saranac, she bundled the frail dying man in sweaters and coats and took him on the train to Wisconsin—or wherever it was.

  “And this clinic diagnosed him. They said that Aldrich had eaten meat exposed to poison gas when he was in France during the war, and that he had developed tuberculosis of the intestines. I don’t know how medically sound any of that is, but that’s what they said. They operated on him and removed most of his intestine, and sent him home to die. They gave him five weeks.

  “Aldrich weighed less than ninety pounds and was in constant agony. Jessie took him back to the big house in Brookline that belonged to her parents. She and Aldrich had lost everything or nearly everything they’d had, except for a few pieces of real estate. Blanchard had paid Aldrich’s salary for two years and then stopped. The grandparents couldn’t bear watching Aldrich’s agony and they went out to the Cape, where they had a cottage. The big house was empty with just the three of them in it, Aldrich never leaving his bed. And Jessie tiptoed all the time, partly not to disturb him, but mainly so she could hear his every sound, his very breathing. He was still the center of the world to her, and Anthony had always had to adapt to that. She did everything for Aldrich: spoonfed him what little he could eat, brought him the bedpan and emptied it, cooked pots of soup, brought him liquids at pill times, which she never forgot.

  “Anthony watched. He tiptoed and. whispered too. There was no room for childhood in that house. At night Jessie would sit on the top step just below the landing, sit there all night, listening. Anthony would creep beside her and slip his hand in hers. They would listen, not that Ald
rich ever cried out, or often moaned. Jessie was listening to his breathing.

  “The doctor came every day. Paunchy, tired, in a rumpled suit, he would examine Aldrich and talk to him briefly. Every day he’d ask again if Aldrich wanted a minister and Aldrich’s answer was always the same, a growled ‘Keep those damn fools away from me!’ The doctor would nod. He would lay some morphine tablets on the bedside table and say: ‘Aldrich, I’ve left you enough morphine to kill a horse.’ And Aldrich would nod.

  “Every day the doctor would descend the stairs heavily, tired in his heart, to the waiting woman and the boy. ‘I don’t know how he can last the night. I’ve left him enough morphine to kill a horse.’ And the woman nodded too.

  “Every day for a month this went on. Every night they sat on the steps. Anthony was only ten. Did he sit there imagining that when death entered the house, he would hear a rustle of wings, a sudden chill? Did he understand what his mother was waiting for?

  “For that matter, did she? Because I’ve never understood what she was waiting for, adding to the death in the house, instead of trying to bring some life in it for the child.

  “Well, Aldrich never reached for the extra morphine. Instead, he got better. Not well, but a little better, a little stronger. After a month, he could sit up in bed; after three, he could come downstairs once a day, for dinner. He would dress carefully, in Brooks Brothers’ flannel trousers and a tweed jacket and a shirt with an ascot, and holding to the banister, standing as erect as an old general, he’d descend.

  “Jessie was still very anxious. The three of them would sit at table, Aldrich’s weakness making him nearly silent, Jessie’s anxiety spreading round the room like fanned air. They all ate, in silence, the foods Aldrich was permitted to eat: never anything else. In silence, Anthony would listen to his father chew the same mouthful over and over: he had to, he had almost no intestine.

  “And sometimes, Aldrich would be seized by a spasm of agony as he sat there, and he would clutch the wooden arms of the dining chair until his knuckles turned white. He never said anything about it. He didn’t have to. At his slightest gesture, Jessie turned rigid and white herself. She would have leaped up, but sometimes he’d growl at her to sit down and eat her dinner. So she waited, but everyone had stopped chewing midbite. Sometimes the pain got so bad that Aldrich fainted. Then the boy and the woman would have to carry him back up to bed.